During the production of integrated circuits, e.g. semiconductor devices such as microcontroller devices, a semiconductor chip may be connected, e.g. glued, e.g. bonded, to a leadframe. The semiconductor chip to leadframe connection may further be sprayed or molded in a chip-housing. Through these productions steps, the fingers of the lead frame may be bent or disturbed. Drifting or movement of the bond wires may arise, due to manufacturing errors. These manufacturing anomalies may be only recognized in the final test, e.g. the end test. Short circuits between the pins, e.g. between the pins of the integrated circuit, may be realized using productions testing at fixed measuring points, and at pre-defined temperatures, e.g. at room, high or low temperatures. Chips which lie on the fringe of performance, “outliers”, are those which are not obviously known to show short circuit characteristics during the end test. They represent a quality risk, as they may end up being delivered to the customers, without having displayed any short circuits during the manufacturing tests. Following delivery, e.g. to an end consumer, the chips may fail, therefore creating problems with respect to the quality of chip manufacturing and production. If these problems were to be eliminated and recognized early, chips with faulty connections to the leadframe may be removed early.
Up till now, the location of fingers of a leadframe and the location and shape of bond wires may be inspected through X-ray inspections systems. Such a method is usually very complex, and can at best, only be applied to a sample part of the chip. In other words, such a method is too complex and expensive to be applied to the entire chip, and therefore, faults may be left undetected, or unchecked. In rare cases, an optical x-ray controller may be used to test the entire chip, e.g. 100% of the chip. However, this is costly and time consuming. Other test equipment systems may generally lack the sensitivity to detect low quality connections between the fingers of the lead frame and the bond wires.